When 11 illegal miners hoisted from an abandoned gold mine were arrested, those still trapped refused to be rescued.

Rescuers work at hoisting illegal miners trapped in an abandoned gold mine of the outskirts of Johannesburg, on Sunday.

By:Star wire services, Published on Sun Feb 16 2014

JOHANNESBURG—Rescue operations at an old South African gold mine were stopped after police arrested 11 trapped miners who had been hoisted out and the rest refused to come up the shaft, the Emergency Rescue 24 service said.

It’s too dangerous for rescuers, who struggled for eight hours to remove boulders blocking the mine entrance, to go in after them, said Werner Vermaak, a spokesman for the emergency service, on Sunday.

The “illegal miners” apparently opened up old sealed shafts to dig for gold that may been overlooked when it was an operating mine, Vermaak said.

The South African Press Association reported that rescue teams were earlier able to speak to about 30 miners near the top of the old mine shaft in Benoni, on the outskirts of Johannesburg, whose entrance was covered by a large rock.

Those miners said as many as 200 others were trapped further down a steep tunnel.

The 11 freed miners received medical treatment and were taken into police custody, Vermaak said. A twelfth man who was halfway up the shaft went back down to avoid arrest.

“It’s very difficult to say how many are still trapped,” he said. “Those who were arrested didn’t say how many. They are afraid of incriminating themselves.”

When contact was first made with the trapped men, indications were that 230 of them were trapped in the 150-metre mine shaft. They were able to communicate and were given water, according to the emergency service.

They were discovered Sunday by police patrolling the area, who heard screaming from the mine, one of almost 6,000 abandoned mines in the country.

Illegal mining is common in South Africa, the world’s sixth-largest producer of gold.